Overall, twin research suggests that, in your alternative life, you might not have gotten divorced, you might have made more money, you might be more extraverted or organized—but you are unlikely to be substantially different in your cognitive ability, education, or mental disease.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Note that the paper is not freely accessible. Another excerpt:
Within European-ancestry samples, however, some polygenic scores now rival the predictive power of traditional variables used in social science research. This was powerfully demonstrated by a GWAS of educational attainment (defined as years of schooling) conducted among 1.1 million people. In an independent sample of European-ancestry participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a polygenic score of education-associated genetic variants was as strongly associated with educational attainment as family income
Possibly related: Andrew Sullivan on Freddy deBoer’s new book.
What was long known to a mere few is now gradually (quickly?) becoming known to many.
In my entire life I’ve never met a single person that believes in genes (excepting literally meeting up with people that discuss it online). I’ve never seen it discussed in real life once. I believe it’s an astonishingly small phenomenon in terms of public knowledge.
Doesn’t everyone believe in genes in their own life? Don’t people talk incessantly about how their kids, their nieces and nephews, their siblings and their cousins are like this or that other family member? Don’t people talk about the “black sheep” of the family whose personality traits differ substantially from the other members of the family? It seems to me that there is a very strong and pervasive folk belief in heredity.
I read somewhere (maybe Plomin’s Blueprint) that people get an unrealistic view of how similar siblings are from movies and tv. Unrelated actors almost always play the siblings and the writers deliberately make the siblings different. One is the jock, one is the nerd, one is shy, one is outgoing, one is social, one isn’t. That way different siblings can have different stories, and there can be more varied intra-familial dynamics.
But strength of mind is exercise, not rest:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale;
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.
-Pope
Fair use access to the article, all hail Sci-Hub!
Thanks!
Also for great comment on Sullivan / Freddie “Cult of Smart”.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/a-single-tax-on-intelligence/#comment-509886
It’s just a long-winded and invalid “life is unfair” argument for more redistribution.
But life IS unfair – but there’s no just way to make it “fair”. There’s no way to make short people taller, nor dumb folk smart, nor ugly guys attractive. (Altho some find a Lamborghini to be a big assist in getting cute girl dates.)
We need to ask the question: “What should society do about low IQ, lazy folk?” What to do about the mentally ill and drug addicts?””
An easy, bad answer is Universal Basic Income.
A much harder, but much better answer is a voluntary National Service, job guarantee.
Those willing to work, perhaps with genes for conscientiousness, should be assisted in getting a job. Those willing to work don’t deserve to be poor.
Maybe those unwilling to work do deserve more poverty; but even lazy Americans should be getting enough soup kitchen free food (Free Lunch!) to avoid malnutrition. They don’t deserve gov’t money to feed any of their addictions, tho.
Not all poor folk are lazy, or mentally ill, but there ARE some. We need to know what society’s plan for such folk; we need to know what the political policy is, so it can (maybe) get improved over time. Not talking about it keeps it unsolved.
Do we need a plan?
Look, I’m not against the idea of having some sympathy for such people, nor discussing some humanitarian solution to living with them.
But does every solution have to end in “they should, at our expense, be able to survive and breed in unlimited quantities, even to the point where it might overwhelm our ability to keep society running.”
Is the commitment to every life and every soul being precious extend that far? To complete self destruction and negation. To a kind of slavery of the productive, if that’s what it takes to keep the UBI/make work jobs spigot on in unlimited quantities?
In Greg Clark is to be believed, we have higher IQ today because the smarter/superior members of society had more surviving children than the dumb/weaker members of society. If those smart/superior members of society took the Christian message of equality and charity 100% seriously and make sure that the dumb/weak had exactly the same resources and their children had exactly the same survival rate then we would never have gotten smarter. We would never have had our industrial revolution and created the world we have today.
I can buy that showing SOME Christian charity was important for forming the kind of semi stable semi lawful/good society necessary for market oriented people to have higher reproductive success as opposed to say the most violent having the most success. But you don’t go full retard/leveler with it.
Even Murray in the Bell Curve had the balls to say that welfare benefits to poor single mothers were too damn high and that immigration of inferiors would be a problem. Are they not God’s special children too?
“immigration of inferiors”; assuming you meant that at face value, I would bet that the vast majority would agree that a higher IQ falls well short of making a person superior in any way other than IQ.
Well said thank you.
On the comments to this blog, I wish we were more focused on those citizens and immigrants that generate a positive net present value vs. those that don’t. It’s still quite possible and noble to have an average or below average IQ and still generate net benefits to yourself, your family and society.
Instead, the comments to this blog tend solely towards an IQ fetish.
Smart is superior than dumb. Smart can do many important, valuable, and productive things that dumb can’t.
Being conscientious is superior to not being so. And lo and behold conscientiousness is linked to IQ! Likely causally (the intelligent can more better imagine the abstraction of the future impact of their actions, and thus act more conscientiously).
Rule following and pro-social is superior to law breaking and anti-social. And of course we find that low IQs behave awfully and criminally in numbers far exceeding the high IQ.
I could go on and on.
The saddest fact to learn from The Bell Curve is not just that the smart have higher IQs, but that they are qualitatively better on every single measure of action we consider to be good, by a long shot. If only the dumb were good hearted salt of the earth types that were morally superior to the effete brains, then they would be easier to love.
Real life Forrest Gumps don’t end up like Forrest Gump. They commit crimes. They knock girls up. They become obese wrecks. They rely on welfare. They do drugs.
The only thing that keeps them in line is fear of starvation or the patrolmen’s billy club.
“It’s still quite possible and noble to have an average or below average IQ and still generate net benefits to yourself, your family and society.”
It’s quite possible for individuals with low IQ to be useful, but it’s not possible for groups of people with low IQ to be a net positive. Groups produce average results, not exceptional or outlier results. Groups are what they are, and the sum total of all individual will and chance averages out in them.
Hence why they always perform in predictable ways. Why aren’t there rich countries with low IQs? If it is so easy for the low IQ to be productive, why not a single one? Etc.
Fantasies about the noble low IQ are a luxury good. We can only pretend to believe them so long as there aren’t too many of them around! Then such fantasies become too expensive a luxury to afford.
@asdf
“Smart is superior than dumb.”
Exactly! That’s why I read Charles Murray and Gregory Clark directly vs. relying on the dumb man’s interpretation of such texts.
@asdf
“I could go on and on.”
Please don’t. There’s more than enough of your philosophical diarrhea here already. We get it.
You aren’t making an argument Hans. You’re playing the disgust card because you’re defeated.
@asdf
Here is another non-argument for you:
Nothing can stop me now
Because I don’t care anymore.
[and, be patient and wait for it. Some of the best drumming you will ever hear. Right there with Bonham]
https://youtu.be/pDXSTAqVwo8
@asdf
And, one of the most endearing parts of this live track is how out of place and awkward Pino Palladino looks throughout. But jeez, he absolutely nailed the bass.
Perhaps you could do some genealogy on Palladino and Ilan Rubin, the drummer? What would Gregory Clark say through the ever perceptive lens of asdf?
And of course, because parental income is correlated with “smart genes” and smart genes are largely passed on to the children, the correlation of parental income and children’s educational attainment is largely a genetic correlation anyway.
I’ve always thought this was blinding self evident, but it would seem that almost no one sees it.
Republicans and Democrats (and most everyone in the education industry) believe that many of our problems would be solved if we just “fix” education. But if educational attainment is mostly a matter of unchangeable genetics, there is no “fix”.
This is a bitter, bitter reality. Few Americans can bear to accept it.
In Andrew Sullivan’s review of deBoer’s book, he describes a “bell curve leftism” that would prevent intelligent people from profiting from their intelligence. Pol Pot tried something similar in Cambodia in the 70s. He found that the only way to keep intelligent people from enjoying the advantages of being intelligent, was to kill them. And to be safe, he went ahead and killed everybody with glasses.
The Pol Pot Communist genocide was, implicitly, the anti-War folk alternative to more fighting. John Kerry, Jane Fonda – genocide of millions (of yellow people) was better than more fighting and dying, in the thousands, of Americans fighting against Communism in Vietnam. Nixon & the US won the war, got Peace (in Paris, 1973-4), but lost the peace in 1975 by not fighting against Peace Accord violations by the commies.
High IQ Jews also supported silly Marxist/ Zionist ideas of communal raising of kids, the Kibbutz system. Unsustainable when there are alternatives for the adults who decide to leave.
All smart people are smart enough to lie to themselves, and believe their own lies. There’s even a word for it.
Rationalization.
I very much doubt “Nixon & the US won the [Vietnam] war.” I very strongly suspect that if Congress had continued to appropriate money, it would have simmered for years with results similar to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The North Vietnamese government never had any intention of allowing an independent non-communist south. The peace accords would have been violated until the country was united under their rule.
The real question is whether the average citizen of Viet Nam is better off or not since the U.S. left. What does the polling say? Is it even close?
North Korea had no intention of allowing an independent non-Communist south either, and violated the peace accords whenever they could, but it didn’t matter because the US didn’t decide to cut off all aid to the South Korean government after 1955.
Korea is also a peninsula with a half mile wide no-man’s-land DeMilitarized Zone between the North and the South. Nothing can cross from North to South. South Korea is a lot more defensible than South Vietnam.
No doubt the Congressional cut-off of funds made the northern takeover quick and relatively easy. But if we stayed in as long as we’ve stayed in Iraq, I suspect we would have a similar result.
Vietnam is also located on a peninsula. The feasibility of setting up a cross-peninsula demilitarized zone was pointed out at the time and this remains roughly the DoD’s official position on how the war could have been won (“On Strategy”, Harry Sommers). Of course there were neutral countries over there; the US chose to more or less respect that neutrality and the NVA completely ignored it, with predictable results.
Vietnam takes up the eastern quarter of that peninsula. Lots of people and supplies came down through countries (Laos and Cambodia) to the west. That was the famous Ho Chi MinhTrail, which was actually many interconnected corridors. Routes were constantly changed to deal with changing circumstances.
Vietnam also has year round tree cover, making it hard to detect transit, unlike Korea.
By 1974, though Laos and Cambodia were technically neutral, they made no effort to stop violations of their territory by the North Vietnamese government. A cynic might call them puppets.
The US military did indeed try to set up a DMZ between the North and the South. It was not a smashing success.
I have discovered a new kind of unemployment.
Hello Arnold, I have an article that explains why since 2000: business investment has been weak; the fall in the U.S net labor share; the decline in the prime age U.S labor participation rate vs large gains elsewhere; the rise in deaths of despair. The article is called Skill Stalagmites, Technology Stalactites and can be found here https://seekingalpha.com/article/4361570-skill-stalagmites-technology-stalactites. I have split the piece into two parts: a 1500 word article for the general reader and a longer piece for the more sophisticated reader. There is a link to the latter at the end of the first piece.
The punchline to the article is that the 4-5% gap in the lfpr between the U.S and peer economies is a form of disguised unemployment. And this is a novel kind of unemployment, which is not caused by a fall in aggregate demand.
The actual cause is that firms are imposing higher effort levels on workers. I can summarize the argument you will find in the main article; it goes like this:
1. Firms impose higher effort demands on workers; workers have to complete more tasks (for a higher wage) or be fired.
2. The higher wage does not compensate workers for their lost work leisure; thus workers look for less demanding job positions (or refuse to move up to more senior roles).
3. If one imagines a skill ladder, then all workers attempt to drop down a rung. This is easy for higher skilled workers, but what happens to workers at the bottom?
4. The lowest skilled workers compete for job openings with somewhat more skilled workers. Firms prefer to hire the more skilled worker, resulting in the lowest skilled workers being pushed out of employment altogether.
5. This assumes that employers can always identify the highest skilled worker from their pool of applicants. This won’t always be the case; if the higher skilled worker has a bad interview or the weaker candidate has positive chemistry with the interviewer, then the objectively weaker candidate can win a job offer.
6. Thus provided the lowest skill workers are willing to keep searching for jobs they will eventually obtain a job offer and regain employment.
7. This means though that workers on the second lowest skill rung will be unable to drop down to the lowest rung unless they also increase their job search activity. And in turn this forces the workers above them to increase their job search.
8. Any person wanting a job now has to apply to many more job positions before they can get their first job offer. But after a string of failures, job seekers become discouraged and temporarily withdraw from the search process. It is this temporary withdrawal that is responsible for the drop in lfpr. For those who are the main breadwinners, the period of withdrawal will be short – perhaps only a few months. But for workers who are more marginally attached to the labor force, it could be years or forever.
9. Evidence for higher effort in the U.S can be found in the higher U.S productivity growth since 2000 vs peer economies.
10. Evidence of higher job search can be found in the elevated duration of unemployment, which in 2019 was still equal to recessionary levels. The American Time Use Survey also shows higher than normal time spent on job search.
The questions of why this is happening post 2000 and not before, and why only in the U.S and not elsewhere, are taken up in the full article.
Hope you enjoy reading and please do spread word of the article around.
Best,
Nathan.
P.S The article is published on Seeking Alpha, but don’t let that put you off. Though I don’t have a formal background in economics, I do keep up with the relevant literature.